Karl Schroeder Quotes

His lantern guttered and finally went out. “Shit,” he said, shaking it. “Excuse me.”
“You’re not afraid of the dark, are you?” she asked, chiding.
“No, ma’am. I’m afraid of what’s in it.”

He was acutely aware of how little attention the people who lived here actually paid to their immediate environment. They seemed cut off from their own senses, cocooned away from their bodies in the infinite spaces of inscape. Cybernetic realities were more real to most people now than their own lives, it seemed. And any connection between those internal spaces and the physical world seemed entirely accidental.

It's not that simple.
Ah! That phrase is Male for 'I'm afraid to.'

They see something they may never have seen before: a normal human reacting normally to a traumatic situation. Livia, these people have been insulated within inscape their whole lives. They have lived in a world where their merest whim could be granted with a thought. Reality has always conformed to their desires—never the other way around. Now they find themselves in a world that obstinately refuses to change itself to fit their imagination. They literally have no idea how to respond.

It's time to abandon the plans of the entity that enslaved me all these centuries, he said. And time to start making my own.

“Then you have no more wish to rule? The country needs you now more than ever.”
She shook her head. “I’ve been crushed under the weight of power all my life. I think I’m going to enjoy missing it.” She laughed at the lightness with which she dismissed royal power. Every moment was a surprise, these days. She hoped that that feeling would never end.

Even the gods fight boredom in vain.

That’s what being human means: to be master of your own fate.

What’s real is what’s valuable. Everything else is just an illusion.

“Which do you prefer?”
Armiger leaned over her and kissed her cheek. “Which what do I prefer?”
“Do you prefer making love or reading?” Her voice held a teasing note, but he had learned there were frequently hidden needs behind her teasing questions.
“To read is to make love to the world,” he said. “But to make love to a woman is to feel like the world is reading you.”
She smiled, not comprehending, and fell asleep.

Only the dead are free of the influence of others.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature.<ref>

I haven't organized my life as a narrative, you know. I'm not sure you'll understand.
As listeners, we are not required to understand, said Qiingi. Only to care.

I am the Government, she said. I am a force of omniscience and unparalleled power within the human part of the Archipelago. I am a public-domain distributed artificial intelligence. I have made all human institutions redundant, for I am the personal and intimate friend of each and every one of the trillion humans under my domain. I am the selfless advocate of each of them, from the lowliest to the greatest.
The only problem is...Well, nobody listens to me much anymore.

In the end, her written ideology, the philosophy and new morals she had preached, were all means to an end. That end could never be reached; Armiger had taught her that. If so, then what mattered their disappointment, their disillusionment? They would hate her for leaving them alive, but they would be alive, and a life lived in bitterness was still better than a death colored by useless fanaticism.